UGC in Dynamic Component Presentations? - tridion

I am having a problem using the UGC framework in conjunction with dynamic component presentations.
When I publish a CP as 'embedded on page', my UGC tags are converted from to nicely and I am able to leave ratings etc. However, if I create a dynamic version of the same CT/CP, what gets deployed to the Broker, is the same component presentation, with the stripped out.
Is there a limitation here that I am not aware of, or maybe some missing configuration?
Any thoughts would be very welcome.

I think you will need to check the output format of your Dynamic CT - Make sure it is set to the same as your target (REL, ASP.NET, JSP etc), and not set to None or HTML

Related

Can Sitecore templates be used to store SQL Queries or JavaScript

We are building a Page with dynamic functionality using ASP.NET + Sitecore 7.0.
Is it practical and appropriate use Sitecore templates for:
SQL Stored Procedure Name to be invoked
JavaScript to be invoked
ColumnNames to be used etc (related to coding customization)
Or should these configuration properties remain inside the ASP.NET Project itself?
What is the primary purpose of Data Templates in Sitecore?
Are they for developer customization or customer-level customization?
The purpose of a data template in Sitecore is to define the set of fields for content items which inherit from that template. - Think of a data template as a class and the content items (pages) as instances of that class.
Templates are usually used to define the user-editable content of pages within a site, that being said you can have items to store information which is not managed by regular content editors. The question is where do you draw the line between things which should be put into Sitecore and things which should be a part of the solution. My advice is only put things in Sitecore if they need to be there. If you have to have the ability for editors or admins to configure those settings/properties.
I would say that putting SQL/ColumnNames is probably a bad idea unless you are building some sort of report builder interface in which case it may be essential?
Likewise with placing JavaScript into Sitecore; this can be OK in moderation (e.g. snippets of analytics code which content editors may want control over?). If you're placing whole libraries of JavaScript into Sitecore, you're probably doing it wrong.
One final point to note is findability/re-factorability of code: if you have code spread between Sitecore and your solution, it can make it very difficult to maintain as it is difficult to get a complete overview of code involved.

Override notification templates and put them on classpath

We need to customize for example the standard mail invitation template by changing the text a bit. I know this can be done by editing the freemarker template for the invitation that is stored in the data dictionary. This is however not optimal when it comes to application packaging. Is it somehow possible to extend the templates in the manner that they could be put on the extension classpath like the regular extension mechanism?
edit:
Found out that the inviation template for emails are hardcoded in the InviteSender java-class. :(
So I guess we will have to extend that class (and a lot of others) to do this.
Another solution I can think of would be to write a patch that replaces the ftl-files in the data dictionary with our edited ones at install time. Any other ideas?
It has been done and has been written in this blog.
In short No there is no out of the box solution for it.
Yes you could bootstrap your files and Patch Alfresco's (that's the most common used way).
You should also consider the fact that changing a template without to have access to the server where Alfresco is installed is a nice feature. With this functional guys who manage/operate/use Alfresco can change templates to their needs.

How edit and save the tridion default templates (TBB's)?

How to edit and save back the default tridion template building blocks say for Ex(Default Finish Actions) provided by SDL?
Where can i found the soucre of default TBB's? After locating and editing the TBB's, how to save back in TCM?
Editing default templates provided by SDL is not supported. They are stored in DLL and there's no way you can customize it. Maximum you can do is to disable some of the templates from being created. Alternatively you can can create your own set of default templates.
You can use the Template Builder to assemble and (test) run Compound Templates (Page and Component Templates). You can access the Template Builder from the Tools tab in the Ribbon.
The default TBBs should not be changed.
.NET TBBs are either C# fragments with the code directly accessible, or classes that implement the ITemplate interface.
Please see the following blog post to get you started:
http://www.createandbreak.net/2011/11/template-building-blocks-via-net.html
The code for (an older version of) most of the Default Template Building Blocks can be found on the Tridion forum (http://forum.sdltridion.com).
(I don't have access anymore, but maybe somebody can edit my answer and provide the link)
As others have said though, you risk getting into support trouble if you simply modify and replace them. It might be better to:
take the code from the forum as a starting point
create your own variant, making the modifications you need
compile this into a new TBB
replace the standard TBB in the Default Finish Actions with your own variant
That way you can accomplish most things, without risking support problems. When they doubt whether you broke is, you can just swap out your own variant for the original and prove them wrong.

Access a component's fields from a custom deployer

I'm trying to create a custom deployer in Tridion 2011 SP1 that can index a component to a solr instance once published. Everything is working fine but I've come across a bit of a problem with the way it indexes the components fields.
I can access the meta data fields okay by using the Component.getCustomMeta() method and parsing the XML. Accessing the normal fields however does not seem to be possible without reading in the file that is being output and parsing the output. This is not entirely feasible as the markup may change and it seems to be a long way around doing what should (hopefully) be a simple thing.
I've had a trawl through the docs and there doesn't seem to be anything available to get the field values so am I at a loss here and will need to parse the output or am I missing something somewhere?
Content fields are not exposed as such on the delivery side, content is exposed as, not surprisingly, "content".
If you really need the fields, you need to:
Produce a "parseable" output for your component presentations
Parse the component presentations as they get published.
Look at implementations like DD4T for similar approaches.
In short - you cannot do it, because Tridion does not expose it Out of the Box. The only way to do it is by changing the content output format through a template.
We have done an alternative workaround to achieve for the similar requirement. One down side with the implementation is extra rendering of Component Presentations in XML and duplicate of xml storage in broker.
Here is what we have done:
Created a Dynamic CT (XML representation of content) GetComponentAsXML and mapped to all schemas
All the Page Templates has a C# TBB that looks up the content that we need to push to SOLR
C# TBB does the RenderComponentPresentation with above Dynamic CT GetComponentAsXML, this pushes the XML (engine.RenderComponentPresentation(component.Id, componentTemplateURI)
Deployer now gets the content in xml format, in addition to the other type of component presentations (like ascx, emebedded on page etc..)
Hope this information helps.

Customization of items in listview based on templates

I have to display product and its description in listview/gridview,like any other eComm application.User want's to set the layout and attribute of product which he want to show while displaying the product.
I am planing to use templates, and provide user to generate templates(XSLT) based on the templates,the layout and attribute would be displayed,however I have no idea weather it is possible or not.Please guide
Check out how www.ventrian.com does their modules - especially the NewsArticles system.
Instead of providing the users an XSLT file to edit to control the layout they have their own templating / token system. There are a lot of modules that use this strategy, XSLT is a little serious if you are expecting 'users' to manage them. Even a lot of people who use DNN to build websites for others professionally have trouble wrapping their head around XML transformations.
But the answer to your question is definitely yes - you can provide XSLT files that transform your XML since it all works just like ASP .NET. But, most the popular modules provide a way for the user to customize layout that is not as complex as this.

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